Part II
3
BETWEEN 8 MAY and 8 August 1788, France changed for ever. A chasm opened at the centre of power – a void from which the unimaginable might arise, even a revolution to shake the world. On 8 May the monarchy, in a desperate effort to reaffirm its authority after years of mounting fiscal and administrative disarray, sent the Parlement of Paris a set of edicts outlining comprehensive reforms to the structure of the state. These edicts sought to remodel and diminish the powers of the parlements: the thirteen supreme courts of law, spread throughout the kingdom. The Conseil d’Artois in Arras, the grandest of the courts in which Robespierre worked, was a distinguished judicial body, exercising some of the same functions as the parlements, but unlike them it did not have supreme jurisdiction.
Under the Old Regime, the parlements had legal, policing and political responsibilities. They were composed mainly, though not exclusively, of nobles, who had often used personal wealth to buy themselves public office. The parlements were highly privileged, conservative in disposition, self-interested and profligate. To their critics, they seemed to go out of their way to defend brutal and inefficient criminal laws or oppressive feudal rights, while responding with reactionary suspicion to innovation in the arts and sciences. Notoriously, the Parlement of Paris had banned inoculation against smallpox within its area of jurisdiction – a third of all France. The parlements were also a thorn in the side of the monarchy because they had the power to deflect or impede royal edicts by simply refusing to register them as laws. Often they produced inflammatory remonstrancesarguing their case, and over the course of the eighteenth century they became the focal point for opposition to the monarchy. When Louis XVI inherited the crown in 1775, he found that his predecessor had resorted to exiling the troublesome parlements. However, the new king immediately recalled them, declaring, ‘It may be considered politically unwise, but it seems to me that it is the general will.’
Louis XVI’s words proved prescient, because as the century drew to its close, conflict between his government and the parlements (and the doctrines which lent them legitimacy, the thèse royale and thèse nobiliaire) reached a dangerous deadlock. Successive royal governments had attempted to institute programmes of desperately needed fiscal and administrative reform, only to founder, sooner or later, on resistance from the parlements. The Parlement of Bordeaux, for example, refused in May 1788 to register edicts introducing freer trade in grain until they were clarified.1 But whilst the parlements could obstruct royal edicts, they had no power to initiate change for the better in France. This was the crux of the problem: even well-intentioned and progressive royal edicts were treated with suspicion by the parlements, determined as they were to retain and exercise their right to oppose the monarch. France was an absolute monarchy, so rights of opposition were few and far between. The parlements attracted popular interest and support for standing up to Louis XVI’s governments, even when the reforms they obstructed were sensible. In the meantime, the country teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, with a public debt of well over four billion livres.2
This immense public debt was caused by the unjust system of taxation that exempted members of the two privileged orders – the Clergy and the Nobility – and burdened everyone else in the Third Estate with taxes which many could not afford to pay. The debt had been aggravated by the expense of the Seven Years War (which ended in 1763) and France’s involvement in the American Revolution. Lavish public spending, at the court in Versailles and elsewhere, had further compounded the problem. Taxation was at the centre of the protracted and damaging struggles between the monarch and the parlements. After the end of the Seven Years War, the parlements vigorously opposed the continuance of wartime taxes. Later they opposed the extension of stamp duty and the establishment of any new permanent taxes. They did this under the popular mantle of objecting to the monarch’s absolute power, but the outcome was the continuing oppression of the Third Estate and the frightening prospect of state bankruptcy.
This was the deadlock that the king’s spokesman, Chrétien François de Lamoignon, aimed to break once and for all on 8 May 1788. Lamoignon was the Keeper of the Seals, a prominent and well-connected nobleman, an intellectual with an unusually long face, who found himself in Louis XVI’s ministry at the worst of times. Six months earlier, with the nearly bankrupt royal treasury forced to borrow an additional 420 million livres, but haughtily unwilling to explain precisely why, Lamoignon had stood before the Parlement of Paris outlining ‘The Principles of the French Monarchy’:
These principles, universally acknowledged by the entire kingdom, are that the King alone must possess the sovereign power in his kingdom; that He is answerable only to God in the exercise of his power; that the tie which binds the King to the Nation is by nature indissoluble; that the interests and reciprocal obligations between the King and his subjects serve only to reassure that union; that the Nation’s interest is that the powers of its head not be altered; that the King is the chief sovereign of the Nation and everything he does is with her interests in mind; and that finally the legislative power resides in the person of the King independent of and unshared with all other powers. These, sirs, are the unchanging powers of the French Monarchy.3
This was a clear, bold statement of the basis on which Louis XVI held power, or at least thought he did. In retrospect it seems mere wishful thinking.
On 8 May Lamoignon set out from his grand house in the Marais Quarter, where literati like Racine and Mme de Sévigné had once come to dine, across an elegant courtyard and through the strong arched gate, to break the power of the institutions that had long formed the bastions of noble privilege in France. He intended to defeat the parlements by introducing an attractive programme of reform, but simultaneously reasserting the absolute power of the monarchy.
The edicts that Lamoignon presented to the Parlement of Paris on 8 May revived earlier attempts to transfer ultimate judicial authority from the parlements to the royal council, or, as Lamoignon proposed, a new plenary court. They introduced much-needed reform of the criminal code, substantial restructuring of the judicial system, the end of the parlements’ involvement in legislation, and an attempt to centralise the legislative process. As a precaution, the Parlement of Paris was dismissed soon after these edicts had been announced, and told not to reconvene until further notice. At first, in Paris and the provinces, there was shock – a stunned realisation that the long-threatened coup against the parlements had finally occurred – and then there was uproar. Lawyers throughout the country rejected the new judicial arrangements. People took to the streets and some demonstrations turned riotous – mobs controlled parts of Rennes, people were killed in Grenoble, lettres de cachet were flying everywhere, trying in vain to silence the parlementsand their supporters. Amidst the chaos, there was mounting clamour for a meeting of the Estates General, the nation’s largest representative body, which had not met since 1614. By now, it was widely hoped that the fiscal and administrative crises in the kingdom could be resolved by this extraordinary representative assembly, as had happened, allegedly at least, on several occasions in the very distant past. On 5 July the royal government tried to deflect attention from the contentious Lamoignon Edicts by announcing that the king would welcome his people’s views on how the Estates General should be organised when – if – they finally met.
As a member of the Bishop’s Court in Arras, Robespierre joined his local legal colleagues in protesting against the Lamoignon Edicts. In recent years he had argued passionately for reform of the criminal code and judicial system, yet in siding with theparlements against the government he was in fact arguing for the perpetuation of privilege – against the erosion of the parlements’ established rights, and against the government’s attempted reforms. This made sense in a situation where the parlements were still the most promising sites of opposition to the absolute monarchy. The full scale of imminent change in France was still unimaginable. There was nothing new for a provincial lawyer like Robespierre to play for yet, so in May 1788 he dutifully – perhaps even somewhat cynically – joined the demonstration of support for the parlements, knowing, as everyone knew, that they were highly improbable promoters of a less corrupt regime, but still the strongest site of opposition to the monarch’s absolute power.
Looking back in 1792, Robespierre presented his behaviour in Arras rather differently to his revolutionary colleagues, claiming that even though he was nothing more than a humble official in a provincial court, he had challenged the Lamoignon Edicts on the grounds that they contravened the sacred principle of the sovereignty of the people.4 He compared himself favourably with members of larger, grander judicial bodies, who had opposed the Edicts on more superficial grounds, objecting merely to the form of the administrative changes. In this way Robespierre backdated his revolutionary career, his unswerving commitment to the people, his incorruptible patriotism, to the spring of 1788, when signs of the gathering political turmoil first reached Arras. Yet the people were far from sovereign in France in 1788. It was the king who possessed the sovereign power, as Lamoignon had recently reminded the Parlement of Paris, and he answered only to God. When Robespierre joined the protest in support of the parlements, he could not have known that the country was months away from a revolution that would alter everything by seizing power from the king and transferring it to the people.
On 13 July bad weather added to the disruption unleashed by the Lamoignon Edicts. A violent summer storm rained enormous hailstones over northern France, some big enough to kill people and livestock caught in fields without shelter, and destroy most of the grain awaiting harvest. The harvest of 1788 was going to be meagre even before the disastrous storm, and the previous year’s harvest had been poor too. The country was facing its second severe winter in a row; there would be hunger, destitution and the threat of starvation; peasants would be unable to pay their taxes, and the royal treasury would find itself bankrupt. Nevertheless, attention was temporarily distracted from these harsh prospects on 8 August, when Louis XVI at last agreed to convene the Estates General. The meeting was set for 1 May 1789 at Versailles. The king’s announcement was quickly followed by a flood of speculation about how exactly the Estates General should or could be organised. Within weeks, the downfall of the king’s ministers, Lamoignon included, and the arrival of the realm’s anticipated plunge into bankruptcy, lent still more urgency – and hope – to these popular speculations.
Ever since he had raised the enormous loan of 420 million livres in November 1787, Lamoignon had been able to reassure his colleagues whenever they nervously asked him, ‘Do we have the cash?’ But by August 1788 the cash was completely gone. The royal treasury had no choice but to suspend payments, government funds plummeted and the markets panicked. On 24 August, Louis XVI recalled the Swiss banker Jacques Necker from exile, in the hope that he could rescue the regime from its wreckage. Though foreign and a Protestant, Necker had risen to high office as director-general of finances earlier in Louis XVI’s reign. His policy of borrowing rather than raising taxes to finance state expenditure had proved successful in the short term, but had not solved the country’s ongoing financial crisis. Necker had been dismissed in 1781. Now Paris was jubilant at his recall after Lamoignon, the scourge of the parlements, fell from power. While Necker’s portrait swayed through the unruly streets above a triumphant procession, an effigy of Lamoignon was reviled and burned outside the splendid family residence in the Marais from. which the man himself had fled. The following year Lamoignon shot himself. It may have been an accident. It may have been suicide.
When the Parlement of Paris was recalled in September 1788, after Lamoignon’s fall, it discredited itself once and for all as an advocate of progress by calling upon Louis XVI to reconvene the Estates General exactly as it had been composed in 1614. In 1614 the Estates General had met in three almost numerically equal, but separately elected, chambers representing the orders of the Clergy, the Nobility and the Third Estate. They had voted separately by order, and it was easy for the Nobility and the Clergy to defeat the Third Estate: two against one. Since 1614 the Third Estate had grown exponentially in numbers and wealth: it now represented 98 per cent of the population, including the rising tax-paying bourgeoisie. So it would be severely under-represented if the Estates General were assembled as they had been in 1614, as the Parlement of Paris demanded. The popular credit the parlements had won through their clashes with the monarch disappeared overnight. Suddenly Robespierre was vitriolic in his denunciations of these old legal institutions. His fury marks the speed with which things were changing, personal chagrin at the small part he had played in shoring up the old order, and a passionate desire to exchange it for something new. Such sudden and violent feelings were far from unique at the time; they were everywhere, and the anger to which he was particularly prone was widespread in the last months of the Old Regime.
Robespierre was one of thousands to publish a pamphlet with ideas on how the promised Estates General should be organised – many of them calling for doubling the number of Third Estate representatives, and for counting the votes by head, not by order. Instead of arguing for the historical, constitutional or theoretical rights of the Third Estate nationwide, Robespierre’s pamphlet had a specific, local focus. It was preoccupied with the Estates of Artois, the provincial governing body grandly accommodated inside the city walls of Arras, and its standing claim to represent the province of Artois. This claim had to be undermined if the province’s deputies to the Estates General were to be newly elected. Unless the claim of the Estates of Artois to represent the province could be overridden, Robespierre had no hope of going to Versailles as a representative of the Third Estate the following year. What a difference in just three months! Instead of turning out for a local demonstration under the Old Regime where there were such unbreachable limits to his ambitions, Robespierre was now within reach of a role in national politics. His recognition of this opportunity – and the ferocity of his determination to seize it – was amazing. In the past he had commented on politics when it intersected with his legal work, or arose in the context of his prize essays, and he was certainly well schooled in the political theory of both Montesquieu and Rousseau, but there had been no hope whatsoever of even a minor role in national politics. Contemporaries in Arras noted with surprise (and some distaste) the vigour with which Robespierre started campaigning for election. He had had very limited, and largely dismaying, experience of elections before, in the Academy of Arras and the legal profession. He knew there was only one outcome that counted – winning – and in his circumstances, luck was not going to be enough.
What was Arras like on the eve of the Revolution? We can visit it as it was at that time if we travel with Arthur Young, an English gentleman farmer from Norfolk and a pioneer of political science. In 1788 Young bought a mare in Bury St Edmunds, confidently assured that she would be fit for at least a year. He had travelled in France before as guest of a noble family, but this time he went like a farmer, alone, on horseback, without servants. On 30 July he left his estate in Bradfield, crossed the channel and arrived in Calais. Then he took the road to Saint-Omer, where he found ‘little deserving of notice’, and on from there to ‘Aire, and Lillers, and Béthune; towns well known in military story’.5
By 8 August Young was on the ‘admirable gravel road’ between Béthune and Arras. When he reached it later that day, Arras proved another disappointment, and he noted in his journal, ‘… there is nothing but the great and rich Abbey of Var [Saint-Vaast], which they would not show me; it was not the right day, or some frivolous excuse’.6 He went off grumpily through the narrow streets. If he had turned left, then left again, he would have walked past Robespierre’s front door on the corner of the rue des Rapporteurs and might unknowingly have passed him returning from work that day. But Young’s mood was ruined and he refused to be impressed even by the town’s imposing gothic cathedral. At the end of his long day he wrote dismissively in his journal, ‘The cathedral is nothing,’ and blew out his candle, tired and disgruntled. The next morning he woke to a city transformed by market day:
Coming out of the town I met at least an hundred asses, some loaded with a bag, others a sack, but all apparently with a trifling burden, and swarms of men and women. This is called a market, being plentifully supplied; but a great proportion of all the labour of a country is idle in the midst of harvest, to supply a town which in England would be fed by one-fortieth of the people. Whenever this swarm of triflers buzz in a market, I take a minute and vicious division of the soil for granted.7
Young was a serious agronomist with strong views on the merits of large-scale farming over small – hence his disapproval of the petty farmers converging on the market with their meagre burdens. He also had wider criticisms of the society and politics he found in France. He despised the despotic government that seemed to take no account of public opinion and the oppressive system of privilege by which the First and Second Estates lived at the expense of the Third. On his travels in the south of the country, he noted, ‘All the country girls and women are without shoes or stockings; and the ploughmen at their work have neither sabots nor stockings to their feet. This is a poverty that strikes at the root of national prosperity … It reminded me of the misery of Ireland.’8 These glaring grievances, so obvious to an attentive English visitor, were prominent causes of the Revolution that was just months away as Young prepared to depart from Arras. On leaving the city, he continued on his way across France: wry, sarcastic, disabused, refusing whenever possible to be remotely impressed. He was still there when the Revolution came. He welcomed it, suspended his sarcasm, and hoped the problems he had noticed on his travels were about to be resolved.
When the provincial government, the Estates of Artois, met in Arras in December 1788, the price of grain was rising dramatically and a winter of misery was setting in. Poverty was a widespread and complex problem in Old Regime France – there was an extensive and nuanced vocabulary to refer to different levels of deprivation, but the blanket term was pauvre. The poor made up over a third of the total population and were identified as ‘The family of a working man where such an individual cannot earn enough to support every member and where the individual members cannot support themselves.’9 At best these people lived at subsistence level. A bad harvest would make many of them destitute – without adequate food, clothing and shelter, they would soon die. These were the circumstances in which Robespierre began his election campaign. His pamphlet, À la nation artésienne, sur la nécessité de reformer les États d’Artois (To the nation of Artois, on the necessity of reforming the Estates of Artois), argues that everything wrong in Artois was the fault of the provincial Estates – and that the only hope of purging corruption from local politics was popular election of the people’s own representatives.10 The provincial Estates had monopolised for their own benefit public powers that rightfully belonged to the people.
In this early pamphlet, Robespierre’s two most prominent political ideas are already present. It is here that he first presents the principle of election that was to characterise so many of his interventions early in the Revolution. This principle was based on a simple and inflexible understanding of what representation must mean in politics: in order to represent a person, or a group of people, you must first be chosen by them. According to him, the bishops in the Estates of Artois represented no one because no one had chosen them for the purpose. Nobles and members of the Third Estate, chosen by the elite, represented only the elite. The poor, meanwhile, were so preoccupied with scraping a living that they had no time to reflect on the causes of their discontent, or the natural rights of which they were being cheated by the unrepresentative Estates of Artois. This sense of the poor as deserving claimants of justice in a corrupt and unfair world is the second of Robespierre’s prominent political ideas. In Artois, he argued that the tyranny of wealthy elites excluded the poor from litigation. In recent years, he had built a professional reputation in the courts for taking on unprofitable individual cases for relatively impoverished clients, but here already the poor have become a collective abstraction, enshrined in his rhetoric, soon to be unleashed in debates that reverberated far beyond Arras.
Unscrupulous, abusive and egotistical ‘enemies of the people’ were vividly present to Robespierre from the start of his political career. He called on justice, reason and humanity to vindicate the oppressed: the moment had come at last for vice to tremble and for virtue to put Arras, Artois, France, perhaps even the world beyond, to rights. In the thick of his election campaign, he attacked the members of the Estates of Artois for refusing reasonable requests for public expenditure on education or sanitation to alleviate public misery while approving the refurbishment of their own offices to the sum of 2,400 livres although they occupied them for just six weeks a year. He scorned the officials who refused to allot public funds for repairing important roads, imposed forced labour on peasants to maintain the roads free of charge, and then provocatively approved the construction of a new trunk road across the province – a completely pointless expenditure, except that it passed a château owned by a member of the provincial administration. The corruption was so transparent that once the road had reached the château, work on it stopped. And this was far from an isolated instance of abuse.
In his pamphlet, Robespierre also denounced these enemies of the people for oppressing their victims with lettres de cachet and imprisoning them. He championed the rights of citizens rotting unjustly inside the Bastille of Artois (as he titled the city prison), thanks to the odious caprice of provincial officials who were no better than local despots. He lamented the fate of men, women and children thrown into prison like animals – even pregnant women, ‘innocent victims of vile persecution’ – and claimed there was not a mother in the province who could not make her son cower merely by mentioning the Estates of Artois. Having thus demonised and defamed the provincial government, Robespierre was certain the people of Artois would choose to change their representatives. The choice facing the people, as he presented it, was between liberty and slavery, happiness and oppression, victory and defeat. The pamphlet’s implicit message was ‘Vote for Robespierre’. Essentially, he conducted his election campaign as if he were already living in a democracy, as if there were popular suffrage, as if politics were open to anyone the people had chosen. None of this was true, but through sheer force of imagination Robespierre continued to suspend his own disbelief. Into his mind there had come the first of many pictures: Robespierre, delegate to the Estates General. He was greatly helped in realising this ambition by the king’s decree on 7 March that Artois was to select its representatives to Versailles by holding new elections, in line with the rest of France – it was not simply to rely on the Estates of Artois to choose them. And so the Estates of Artois, the long-time emblem of regional privilege and independence, had been superseded; the first great obstacle in Robespierre’s path had melted away.
Nevertheless, his chances of election were slight. Because the Estates General had last met in 1614, no one remembered exactly how its delegates had been chosen. Louis XVI told his ministers to consult the archives, but this did not get them far since much had been left to local discretion in 1614: there was no coherent codification of the procedures. So the king’s minister Necker had to invent one. The electoral statute that resulted was an uneasy attempt to reconcile ‘respect for customary practice’ with ‘current circumstances’.11 It decreed that the Clergy and the Nobility would choose their delegates through direct elections. However, the Third Estate was to elect deputies indirectly, through a series of preliminary assemblies that would allow rural communities and traditional artisan guilds to participate. The number of deputies for each region was decided on the principle of proportional representation ‘according to their population and resources’. An exception was made for Paris, for which Necker designed a special electoral procedure – even more complicated. Those eligible to participate in the Third Estate’s elections included all male commoners, born or naturalised in France, aged over twenty-five, and listed on the tax rolls. Voting was commonly by open ballot, and an absolute majority was required to win.
On Monday 23 March Robespierre attended a meeting at his old school, the Collège d’Arras, for all the members of the Third Estate who did not belong to one of the city’s thirty-nine trade guilds or corporations (apothecaries, carpenters, tailors, wig-makers and so on). Whereas the corporations met calmly and elected their representatives without any trouble, the meeting in the college church was chaotic. It got off to an unpromising start, with people turning up slowly between seven and nine thirty in the morning. Soon afterwards, a bitter fight erupted between the ordinary people who comprised the Third Estate and the échevins, or town councillors – who, in Robespierre’s opinion, were at least as suspect as the members of the old Estates of Artois had been.12 He attacked these councillors for corruption by association with the Estates of Artois, which had allowed councillors to attend meetings of the Third Estate. This practice was continuing despite the recent demise of the Estates of Artois. In their defence the councillors argued that they were as entitled as any other members of the Third Estate to a part in the election of its deputies.
After two long days of deliberation, twelve deputies were chosen to draw up a list of the Third Estate’s grievances (cahier de doléance) and go on to the next electoral assembly. Robespierre was one of the twelve and so was his friend Buissart. As Robespierre put it, ‘the people expressed their joy loudly in multiple applause, imposing, no doubt, a great responsibility on those whom it honoured with these touching and energetic proofs of its confidence’. In this rapturous account, however, Robespierre was ahead of himself – this was just the first stage of elections for the Third Estate and there were still three to go.13 At the next election meeting, a few days later, in the college church again, fifty-three deputies from the corporations joined the Third Estate’s twelve approved candidates. At this time, as well as helping to draw up the general grievances of the Third Estate, Robespierre agreed to draft a list of specific grievances for the corporation of cobblers. Since this was one of the most impoverished and illiterate of the corporations, he may have been motivated by his habitual sympathy with the poor. But he was also eager to broaden the base of his potential supporters: so early in the electoral process no effort was too speculative, no publicity or source of support too insubstantial.
The fight with the town councillors came to a head in an argument between Robespierre and his old mentor at the Academy, Dubois de Fosseux, over a change in protocol. Dubois de Fosseux, himself a councillor, was also a member of the ‘noblesse non entrante’, a person whose family had attained nobility comparatively recently. He was wealthy and less provincial than Robespierre, having spent six years at court in Versailles and developed a taste for literature and the theatre, about which he corresponded with Beaumarchais (already famous for his play Le Mariage de Figaro, the inspiration for Mozart’s opera). As secretary of the Academy, Dubois de Fosseux had many other correspondents from all over France.14 He was highly respected for his public service in Arras, his involvement in improving roads and canals and his attempts to monitor and resolve local economic crises. He was present in the assembly of the Third Estate (in addition to the assembly of the Nobility) because he held municipal office. He disputed the relentlessly pejorative terms in which the councillors were characterised by Robespierre, in particular. This bitter, time-wasting dispute raged for three days, and on 29 March the Third Estate of Arras had still not elected its deputies to the key meeting of the Third Estate of the whole district, or bailliage, which was scheduled for the following day. The election was finally held in the middle of the night. Of the twenty-four who were chosen, four were councillors and the majority were lawyers. Robespierre came fourteenth on the list.
The next morning the tired new deputies returned to the college church (if they had left it at all overnight) to welcome representatives of the other 245 constituencies of the bailliage, with a view to further amalgamating the province’s extensive lists of grievances. The list presented by the twenty-four representatives of the Third Estate of Arras bore signs of Robespierre’s influence. It included a complaint against the shaming of the families of criminals by their association with bad blood, the subject of Robespierre’s inaugural speech at the Academy of Arras, and several other suggestions for reform of the criminal code. Perhaps it is true, as one hostile biographer claimed, that at this time Robespierre organised his country relatives in Carvins into campaigning on his behalf. Or perhaps the representatives from the countryside, escaping from a stronger sense of oppression than their counterparts in urban Arras, proved more responsive to Robespierre’s dramatic rhetoric. Whatever the reason, when the 550 representatives from across the whole province voted, he was one of just 49 chosen to draft the final, most comprehensive list of grievances for the Third Estate. Even Robespierre himself could not tell whether it was luck, strategy or a combination of both which had won him this opportunity.
Within the assembly, he continued to align himself with radical democratic proposals, defending, for example, the idea of reimbursing those delegates who usually lived off their earnings for income lost during the elections. Never one to drop a fight, he asked sarcastically: ‘Do you think the councillors will not find an objection to this demand? They will reply that it appears just, but that they oppose it on form.’ Only a quarter of the 550 delegates could go through to the next stage – the final assembly of the Third Estate from which the representatives to Versailles would be chosen. Robespierre’s name went forward for the final meeting at which he might still be chosen for Versailles. It was at this point, waiting nervously, that he wrote a second political pamphlet, characteristically entitled Les ennemis de la patrie démasqués (The Enemies of the Country Unmasked), which recounted his experiences of elections in recent months, and reviled anyone who had stood in the way of his candidature. It ended in high style:
One trembles when one sees the causes behind the choosing of representatives who will decide the destiny of the nation. May God keep us from such vain causes, and inspire in all citizens the spirit of righteousness, truth, courage and disinterestedness, the celestial love of humanity, and that healthy passion for the public good on which depend the happiness of the people and the safety of empires.15
Because of the timing of Easter, an important consideration in devout Artois, it was not until 20 April that the Third Estate met with the Nobility and the Clergy to hear Mass in the Abbey of Saint-Vaast, swear a solemn oath before the Bishop, and separate again to choose their representatives by ballot.16 There had been no assembly on this scale at Arras within living memory. Considerable sums of money were spent preparing the cathedral and perfuming the halls in which the Estates would meet, surrounded by tapestries. When the chairman of the Third Estate proposed sending an amiable greeting to the other two orders, Robespierre immediately opposed it: what was there to congratulate them on? In his retrospective account of 1792, he cited this episode as another instance of his having upheld the principle of the sovereignty of the people, just as he had done against the Lamoignon Edicts.
Divisions not merely between, but also within each of the three orders dominated the elections in Artois, as they dominated elections elsewhere in France. Across the country the higher and lower clergy were divided. Differently ranked nobles were divided. And the Third Estate, as Robespierre had seen, was riven with divisions. In all three Estates the deputies elected to the Estates General were chosen primarily because they were known to have opposed government directives in recent years, Robespierre among them. Dubois de Fosseux attended the meeting of the nobility and drafted their grievances, but he did not stand as a candidate for election because his mother was gravely ill and he did not want to be separated from her for months to come. He remained behind and resumed the wide network of correspondence he had developed since becoming secretary of the Academy of Arras. In this role he was invaluable as witness and recorder of revolutionary change across France.
By 30 April Robespierre was sure at last that he had been chosen fifth as one of the Third Estates’ eight representatives from Arras. The elected deputies were due in Versailles in a matter of days for the ceremonial opening of the Estates General on 4 May. Robespierre would have been happy to leave even sooner. The maid who helped him pack remembered that he had very few clothes and belongings: a bag of powder and a puff for his meticulously maintained hair; perhaps the shaving bowl which is now in the Musée Carnavalet; some very clean linen (six shirts, six collars, six handkerchiefs); three pairs of stockings (one almost new); one pair of well-worn shoes and a newer pair; a satin waistcoat (probably pink) and a waistcoat of raz de Saint-Maur (a very fine shaven cloth) which was threadbare; three pairs of trousers, one black, one green and one black velvet; a black cloth coat and his lawyer’s gown. There were also clothes brushes, shoe brushes, needles and thread (his mother had taught him to sew as well as make lace before she died).17 Everything fitted easily into the trunk he borrowed from one of his sister’s friends. He may also have needed to borrow money for the journey that cost about 35 livres.
Some say the coach waited for him outside the theatre in the Place de la Comédie, since it could not enter his narrow street, and a small crowd of well-wishers gathered to see him leave. But these were hard times in Arras and there was little optimism in the streets, where there had recently been riots over bread shortages. During the past few months, as the electoral assemblies argued among themselves in their perfumed halls, hungry mobs marauded outside, with no reason to believe that the changes imminent in France would benefit them personally. It is more likely that Robespierre took his place in the public coach to Paris that changed horses in Arras at the merchant Lefebvre’s, and that his siblings and a few of his small circle of friends waved him off from there. According to one story, he turned to the servant who carried his bag to the coach for him and boasted that he would one day make him mayor of Arras. In another version Robespierre threw a celebratory dinner for his friends before leaving and said to a servant nicknamed Lantillette: ‘Remember, my dear friend, that everything is going to change in France. Yes! … the Lantillettes of this world will become mayors and the mayors will be Lantillettes.’18 There is more personal spite in this than revolutionary foresight, yet when he left Arras in 1789, Robespierre had reason to expect that he would return to find it dramatically altered.